Northwest Broken Chains: Skippers

A while back, Retail Retell introduced me to the Broken Chains Blog, a fascinating (but sadly apparently defunct) blog on retail chains (primarily restaurants) that are in deep decline, particularly where the parent company no longer exists and the remaining locations are operating semi-independently. Ever since then, I've wanted to put together a "broken chains" post of my own. I'm sure there are examples of this all over the place; the northwest has several (I was just discussing another one with Anonymous in Houston the other day), and today we're going to be looking at Skippers. 

Skippers is a chain of semi-fast-food seafood restaurants that was founded in Bellevue (across the lake from Seattle) in 1969. The closest comparison nationally would probably be Long John Silver's, but Skippers is somewhat less fast food-y and (at least historically, but we'll get back to that later) better quality. I'm not a big historic research person, but the Wikipedia article on them sure makes it sound like a classic broken chain -- they expanded a bit more than they probably should have through franchising, then went into a deep decline that culminated in most locations closing and the corporate-level company shutting down, leaving just a handful of locations still owned by individual franchisees. However, the story took a different turn than most, as a new corporate entity took over shortly later and put a good bit of effort into turning the company around, introducing new ideas (mail-order sales and mini-format locations franchised to existing convenience stores), and a few new full locations even opened (though most if not all of those new locations have since closed). 

 The first location I tried to visit was the one in Vancouver, WA, which I drove by on my way home from the Oregon Coast last summer. However, when I got here, I found that the store was closed for the day! Apparently this location was open rather limited hours, despite what its website and Google Maps claimed, so that was a bit disappointing. Oh well, I guess that's just what you get from a broken chain! This is a standard Skippers location from their heyday, though it's one of the few that have been updated to the current logo. You can see a bit of labelscar from their old logo poking out from the banner on the right.

I thought this old neon Take Out sign within the classic Skippers porthole window was pretty neat!

The road sign features the current (post-bankruptcy) Skippers logo, along with a note that this location (like all of the others these days) is "locally owned and operated". 

Strangely, this location no longer has any real signs on the building itself, just all of these window decals plus a ton of flags on the roof. 

So that visit was a bust. The closest remaining location to Seattle is in Kent, so I had been wanting to visit that one for quite a while (even before I decided to swing by the Vancouver location while driving by), but in the end I made a completely unplanned stop in early 2022, having not realized it was right across the street from another place I was photographing.

This is another fairly standard Skippers, and actually has a drive through, something the Vancouver location surprisingly lacks. This one still has the pre-bankruptcy Skippers logo everywhere.

Sorry about the quality of these exterior pictures -- this was an unplanned stop, and since this was January, the sun gets low enough to interfere with pictures way too early. I love the neon signs in the front windows! 

This store is very heavily decorated, in a nautical theme of course. I'm not normally a fan of this sort of over-the-top decor, but I like it here. 

I suspect the decor in here is pretty much all from the broken chain era -- the chalkboard menu in particular seems like a newer addition (I believe Skippers used the traditional fast food menu design, backlit with removable letters; at least, I remember the Port Angeles location having that). The employee seen here seems to have been the only person working when I was here, taking indoor orders, running the drive-through, and cooking, with the main kitchen space being the area directly behind the counter. 

I took a booth right in the middle of the floor to be able to get a good look around. Most of the decor here seems fairly recent, so it looks like whoever owns this place still puts some real effort into it.

It seems like Skippers' big thing (at least post-bankruptcy) is clam chowder (they even sold canned clam chowder online for a while, though that seems to have been removed from their website); however, I am not a seafood person and about the only seafood I like is fish and chips, so that's what I ordered. Plus, my parents really liked Skippers back in the day, and have said that their fish and chips in particular were very good. Sadly, that no longer seems to be the case -- while everything was made fresh (hence why I called Skippers semi-fast-food -- even people who ordered through the drive through waited a good 10-15 minutes for fresh food to be made, which seems like a good tradeoff to me but is far from what true fast food places would do), the quality was still rather lacking. The fries seemed much like what you would buy frozen at the grocery store, and the fish wasn't much better. Judging by what I've heard about Skippers at its prime, it seems like they've gone downhill quite a bit. This is a real contrast to Ivar's, which still really does fast food seafood right, with a larger menu and better quality.

Here are a few more pictures as I was on my way out. The restaurant certainly wasn't busy, but there were a few other tables plus a few cars coming through the drive through while I was here; since I was here at a somewhat odd time between lunch and dinner time, that doesn't seem too bad for a broken chain.

Anyway, that's it for this Broken Chains knockoff post! While the food here wasn't the greatest, I still enjoyed this little bit of lost Northwest restaurant history. I hope you enjoyed this post, something rather different than I normally do -- I don't have any concrete plans to do something else like this in the future, but maybe I will one day. Back to normal posts tomorrow!